The Hidden Base Read online

  A. E. Warren

  * * *

  THE HIDDEN BASE

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  After spending eight years working as a lawyer, A.E. Warren began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK, which is the science fiction, fantasy and horror imprint at Penguin Random House.

  She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

  The Hidden Base is the sequel to Subject Twenty-One, and second book in the four-book Tomorrow’s Ancestors series.

  You can find her at aewarren.com or one of the following:

  Instagram: @amauthoring

  Facebook: @amauthoring

  Twitter: @amauthoring

  Pinterest: @amauthoring

  BY A. E. WARREN

  Tomorrow’s Ancestors

  Subject Twenty-One

  The Hidden Base

  For Mum and Dad, with love

  ‘Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.’

  H. G. Wells

  CHAPTER 1

  Elise

  Elise stood on the pebble-strewn shoreline and peered into the lake. The surface was still and reflected a mirror image of the snow-capped mountains behind it. The weather had warmed up in the last few days and she hadn’t washed properly since leaving Thymine Base – she had a horrible suspicion she was beginning to smell. Stepping back, she shuddered at the thought of letting even a drop of water touch her.

  Next to her, Luca gave an identical grimace. ‘So, let me get this right … you’re telling me not only can we drink the water, we can swim in it as well?’

  Luca was running his hand over the back of his head. His shaved hair was beginning to grow out and his blond baby curls were forming once again.

  ‘That is correct,’ Samuel said, his previously patient tone beginning to crack. ‘The chances of a mutating virus are basically non-existent. As I said, the fear of untreated water is instilled in you from birth so you become reliant upon the treated water. They then limit its supply, which means leaving the base you grew up in is never an option. It’s quite clever, really.’

  ‘Or takes manipulation to another level,’ Elise said, still peering into the water. Logically, she knew it was safe, but it was hard to take that to heart. Even dipping an investigatory toe went against everything she’d been taught from birth.

  ‘Yes, that too. You are fine to swim in untreated water but you should always boil any water you intend to drink. The viruses in your bedtime stories might not exist, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a rotting animal carcass at the bottom of the lake or upstream in a river.’

  Luca turned to Elise and raised an eyebrow. ‘I think he’s trying to kill us.’

  ‘If it’s so safe, why don’t you go in first?’ Elise said to Samuel, still unsure whether she believed him.

  ‘If that’s what it takes,’ Samuel said, beginning to unbutton his shirt.

  Luca raised both his hands. ‘At least leave the pantaloons on.’

  ‘I was going to! And they are not pantaloons. They are standard-issue, mid-line middies … and you accuse me of overusing Pre-Pandemic terminology?’

  Elise turned from Samuel to give him some privacy while he undressed. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she smiled back at Georgina and Kit, who were sitting next to each other with five-month-old Bay propped up between them. Elise tried not to stare at the prominent keloid scar that zigzagged its way from the outer corner of the nurse’s eye, tracing its way down to her chin.

  Elise glanced at her own arm; the only mark was the mandatory tattoo on the inside of her right wrist, which she’d been given when she was fourteen: Elise Thanton, 17 February 2250, Thymine Base, Sapien.

  While she waited for Samuel to undress, she inspected the index finger and thumb on her right hand. They had started to heal but still ached continuously; it would be a few weeks until she knew how much movement she would recover. This was the price she had paid for escaping Thymine. The person who had broken them, Fintorian, had paid an even heavier price.

  The splash of Samuel kicking in the lake made Elise turn back again. When he was farther away from the shore, he stopped and floated on his back, the water gently rippling around him. He looked at peace, no hint of the strained expression he had worn since leaving Thymine. Elise knew he felt responsible for them all and she wanted that to change as soon as possible, to relieve him of some of the burden.

  ‘Oh, why not …’ Luca mumbled to himself as he started tugging off his boots.

  Sighing, Elise walked farther along the shoreline before peeling off her clothes; she knew she had to force herself to go against her instincts if she wanted to unravel all of the misconceptions she had grown up with. The loud splash of Luca belly-flopping into the water made her grin, but she resisted glancing over at the two men and instead went back to her solitary thoughts.

  The initial thrill of exploring the outside world was beginning to fade. The changing landscape as they continued northwards, woodlands to moors, grasslands to mountains, had held Elise captive and she’d thought nothing could lessen that feeling.

  But that had all changed a week ago, when she realised that it was her nineteenth birthday. She had spent the day thinking about what her parents would do to celebrate it now that she was no longer with them. Would they celebrate it at all? It was the first time she had spent a birthday away from them, the first time she had not opened her small gifts and let her younger brother blow out the candles on her cake.

  Since then, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that her family were not as she had left them. That everything had changed for them too. Day by day, this gnawing doubt increased, taking her attention away from her surroundings as her focus turned inwards.

  What had happened to her family? She couldn’t know. She hoped they had convinced the authorities that they’d disowned her before she did the unthinkable. But when she lay awake at night she would imagine that the Protection Department had come for them as punishment for what happened to Fintorian. That they had taken her younger brother Nathan away. Her dad would have been killed in the struggle; he wouldn’t have let Nathan go without a fight. Her mum? They could have told her anything about Elise and she would have no way of finding out if it were true …

  The pebbles dug into her toes as she hesitantly dipped her foot into the cool water. Grimacing at the temperature, she stepped forwards and her frown slowly receded. Back in Thymine, treated water was such a precious resource that their ninety-second spluttering showers were on timers.

  Slowly moving forwards until she was up to her chest in the lake, Elise took a moment to gaze
around her in the fading light. The wind had dropped and the lake was still again – if it weren’t for the squawks and splashing coming from Samuel and Luca farther down the shoreline, she could have imagined herself the only person in the world. Instead, she settled on picturing her small group of friends as the only people in existence. She had not seen another sign of human life since leaving Thymine. It was quite possible that they were the only travellers who had stopped here in hundreds of years.

  With only her head above the water, Elise tentatively pulled her feet up from the bed of the lake and promptly felt herself starting to sink. She snapped her legs back down again and gasped as she tried to stop her head from going under the water. How was Samuel staying afloat? She resolved to ask him about it another time. Now that her world had opened up, she wanted to know everything. She surreptitiously listened to all the queries Luca directed at Samuel and his informative answers, but hesitated to ask her own. She was uncomfortably aware that her friendship with him was unequal – she didn’t want to be his student any longer. Now they had left Thymine and all its restrictions behind, she wanted to finally be his equal. Tilting her head up to the sun, she enjoyed the contrasting temperatures.

  She knew she would always remember the first time she was encased in water.

  Later that evening, Elise built a large campfire by the edge of the lake. Although she had been teaching the others, she was still the quickest at creating a flame using only the iron pyrite and flint.

  ‘How long until we get to Uracil?’ Georgina asked, spooning mashed parsnip into Bay’s eagerly awaiting mouth.

  Despite their relatively clean escape, and no signs of pursuit, they had only recently started to believe that they would actually make it safely to Uracil. Consequently, they had begun to tentatively discuss their arrival.

  ‘Not long – we should arrive late tomorrow if we leave at daybreak,’ Samuel responded.

  ‘And you haven’t been there since you were eighteen?’

  ‘Nearly seven years now.’

  Luca shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe that all this time we thought there were only four bases, and now it turns out there’s a fifth settlement hidden away that even the Potiors don’t know about. Are there any other big revelations? Are you going to tell me that griffins really exist?’

  ‘Griffins do not exist,’ Samuel clarified, now at pains to clear up even the smallest of misconceptions after Luca had spent three days looking out for the Loch Ness monster.

  ‘I hope the leaders of Uracil will let me stay; I just want somewhere safe to bring up Bay,’ Georgina said, cradling her adopted daughter.

  ‘She is not just yours,’ Kit signed. ‘She needs all of us. And I need her. We are the only two of our kind outside the bases.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that, Kit. I know she needs you just as much as me, more as she gets older,’ Georgina said, smiling down at Bay, who made the sign for ‘hungry’ again with her tiny, cupped hand. Georgina had also begun to learn some sign language on their journey and all of the group had been helping her.

  Elise glanced over at Kit, pleased that he had finally made his stance clear. She knew that he’d been worrying about his role in Bay’s life.

  Dressed in Samuel’s borrowed clothes, Kit did not appear to be that different to the rest of them. Elise thought he would only draw a few curious stares from anyone who encountered him; perhaps something about his unfamiliar features would hold their attention, but it was unlikely they would leap to the conclusion that he was a different species of human.

  Kit was a lot shorter than Samuel, but that was an unfair comparison as Samuel was at least a foot taller than the rest of them. Elise and Kit were around the same height, but Kit weighed twice as much as her due to his densely packed muscles. He had a round, barrel chest and was one of the strongest men Elise had ever met.

  Bay was also sturdily built, but as a female she was slightly less muscled. She had the same prominent brow bridge and wide features as Kit, but these were softened by her auburn hair, which Georgina had tied in a bow at the top of her head. It sprayed out and jiggled when she moved; Elise always thought it made her look like a pineapple.

  The prominent lump of skull at the back of their heads, called the Occipital Bun, was more visible on Bay as her hair was thinner. Kit tied his long, straight hair with a leather strap at the base of his neck, which partially hid the differing shape of his skull. They both had light-coloured complexions and no more body hair than the rest of the group.

  ‘What do you want to do when you get to Uracil?’ Elise signed to Kit before saying the words so Georgina could learn to sign them.

  Kit fluently and eloquently expressed himself through sign language. Even though he could understand her spoken words he had difficulty saying them and she knew he preferred it if she signed. He had once told Elise he could read people’s hands like their facial expressions, every gesture an additional indication of their meaning.

  ‘I want to make sure Bay is safe. We did not rescue her just to put her into another museum,’ Kit signed, with Elise saying the words out loud for Georgina.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I want to free as many of the Neanderthals from the other museums as I can.’

  ‘If you want to go back to the bases, you’re going to need some help,’ Elise signed, fully aware of the consequences.

  ‘Are you sure? What about your family, your brother? I thought you wanted to go back to Thymine as soon as possible for them, bring them to Uracil?’

  Elise hadn’t realised how much Kit had read her change of mood. She smiled at him; it was hard to keep anything from Kit. ‘I do, and I will, but maybe we can rescue a member of your family on the way.’

  Kit smiled at Elise in his own unique way, creasing the corners of his eyes until they disappeared and only slightly pulling up the edges of his mouth.

  ‘I will come as well,’ Samuel signed. ‘It’s the least I can do. But we can only extract one of them at a time, leaving large gaps. If the Potiors find out what we are up to they will tighten security, and could come after us. We cannot risk Uracil being discovered. I will never let that happen.’

  They all turned to look at Luca, who was spooning broth into his mouth.

  He met each of their gazes. ‘What? Course I’m coming. I’m not going to sit around listening to you all tell me about your latest, greatest adventure.’

  Kit scrunched his eyes and smacked Luca on the back, making the broth spill onto the ground.

  ‘So, which base then?’ Luca said, quickly spooning the soup into his mouth before he lost it again. ‘I want to go to Adenine: “Guidance and Governance”. I could see if I have any relatives left, find out why I was shipped over to Thymine as a baby.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Luca, but it can’t be Adenine,’ Samuel signed. ‘As the capital of Zone 3, it would draw too much attention. We also have to aim for where one of the younger Neanderthals is held.’ Samuel hunched forwards. ‘The older ones, well, they won’t be in very good shape. Isolation like that doesn’t play well on the mind.’

  ‘Seventeen was fine until she got pregnant,’ Luca said rather defensively. He’d looked after Thymine’s other Neanderthal until she died in childbirth having Bay.

  ‘Yes, but she had you and me. A lot of the other Companions and Collections Assistants are indifferent to the social needs of the Neanderthals.’ Samuel sighed. ‘It always seemed so obvious to me. If you put any human baby in a cage, told them their kind had previously been extinct, that they were now one of only a handful to be brought back, and gave them only one or two people for company, of course that baby would struggle to grow up without problems. So, why do they think it’s so very different for a Neanderthal?’ Samuel glanced at Kit and hurriedly continued. ‘I have always said that it’s a credit to your strength of self that you have remained as you are.’

  Kit nodded his acknowledgement.

  ‘There are no Neanderthals left in Thymine and we can’t risk
going to Adenine. That only leaves Cytosine and Guanine,’ Elise signed.

  ‘Where is Twenty-Two?’ Kit asked.

  Twenty-Two was the twenty-second Neanderthal to be brought back through a process similar to cloning. In the museum, Kit had been named Twenty-One. Samuel had encouraged Kit to think of another name for himself to help with his sense of identity while living in near isolation.

  ‘If I remember correctly,’ Samuel signed, ‘Twenty-Two is a female. She was born only a few months after Kit, making her fourteen years old, and she is kept in Cytosine.’

  Elise sat up. She had always been fascinated by the idea of visiting Cytosine: ‘Ingenuity and Enlightenment’. It was the base that pushed the boundaries of scientific discovery. She used to wish she had been born there rather than Thymine, whose label was ‘Purpose and Productivity’, the essential, but stagnant, manufacturing base.

  ‘Cytosine’s south of Thymine, isn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, at the southernmost tip of Zone 3 and, consequently, the most isolated of all the bases,’ Samuel responded.

  ‘We should have gone there first, when we left Thymine. We have lost so much time,’ Kit signed.

  ‘We have to get Bay to safety. We can’t risk her being recaptured,’ Samuel signed. ‘We know Twenty-Two will be safe for the moment. Not free, but looked after. Let’s just get to Uracil first, settle in there and then we’ll decide on our next move.’

  Elise smiled reassuringly at Kit. ‘Try not to worry. I’m sure Twenty-Two is fine. The Neanderthal Project is important to the museums, so we know she’ll be cared for.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Elise

  The next morning, they cleaned up the campsite twice as fast as usual, keen to ensure they would reach Uracil before nightfall. As always, they made sure that there were no signs of their route that could be traced from Thymine. The threat of the Protection Department following them was always in their thoughts.